Brussels and the Border

Brussels and the Border

by Phyllis Schlafly

March 30, 2016

The bombs that killed 35 and injured 300 in Brussels, Belgium, shutting down the capital city of the European Union, followed a familiar pattern. Young Muslim men born to immigrant parents were inspired by radicals overseas to wage holy war against Western civilization.

President Obama, attending a baseball game in Cuba when the bombs went off, did not change his plans to go on to Argentina where he performed a tango with a professional dancer. In a previously recorded interview published in the latest issue of The Atlantic magazine, Obama said Americans have an inordinate fear of terrorism because we’re more likely to die from falling in the bathtub.

Ohio Governor John Kasich said on Fox News, “We cannot afford to alienate all the Muslims in the world who, by the way, are condemning this act of murder in overwhelming numbers.” Kasich seemed to be saying that when Muslims engage in jihad, it’s our fault for doing something to “alienate” them.

That’s such a perfect example of political correctness, it’s no wonder Kasich has lost 30 out of 31 Republican primaries and caucuses to Donald Trump. And, by the way, there’s no evidence to support Kasich’s claim that Muslims around the world are condemning terrorism in overwhelming numbers.

Even the New York Times, in its news report from Belgium, attributed terrorism to “poorly integrated Muslim immigrants.” We, too, have millions of “poorly integrated” immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America. Consider these crimes by immigrants in recent weeks.

In Kansas City, Kansas, Pablo Antonio Serrano-Vitorino is accused of shooting four men inside a house there. He then crossed the state line to New Florence, Missouri, where he killed a fifth man in front of the man’s wife.

After he was apprehended, we learned that Pablo was an illegal alien from Mexico who had been stopped last September for a traffic violation in Overland Park, Kansas. Despite records showing that he had been previously deported in 2004, ICE sent the detainer to the wrong county, and he was released.

In Framingham, Massachusetts, brothers Elmer, Ariel, and Adan Diaz and their friend Marlon Josue Jarquin-Felipe are accused of seizing a young woman off the street, gang-raping her, and beating her boyfriend who tried to rescue her. All four thugs were illegal aliens from Guatemala, Central America; two had previously been deported after convictions for drunk driving.

In South Omaha, Nebraska, Eswin Mejia is accused of street racing while drunk, causing a crash that killed a 21-year-old Iowa woman, Sarah Root. Despite being an illegal alien from Honduras, Central America, Mejia was released on bond with no ICE detainer because the Obama administration has “de-prioritized” the deportation of illegal aliens with no previous felony convictions.

Murder, rape, and mayhem by motor vehicle are not the only consequences of immigration from south of the border. We’re also fighting diseases brought in by immigrants, including the frightening new Zika virus as well as old diseases such as tuberculosis which we thought we had eradicated.

The Centers for Disease Control just reported that the number of TB cases rose last year for the first time in 23 years. Contrary to liberals who say the disease doesn’t discriminate, most TB cases occur in immigrants from Mexico, China, India, Vietnam and the Philippines and their U.S.-born children.

When Hillary Clinton was campaigning in Arizona on the eve of that state’s Democratic primary, she bragged that “I voted to secure the border when I was in the Senate” and “I think we’ve done a really good job securing the border.” Like so many of Hillary’s statements, nothing could be further from the truth.

Within a week of Hillary’s statement, authorities discovered a Mexican-built drug-smuggling tunnel the length of four football fields running from a restaurant in Mexicali, Mexico to a house in Calexico, California. At the other end of the border in Hidalgo, Texas, frightened residents invited the local TV news to film dozens of men crossing through their back yards every night from Mexico.

The president of the National Border Patrol Council told a House subcommittee that the number of people arrested at the border from Afghanistan, Pakistan and China is up dramatically from last year. Brandon Judd also testified that official statistics are low-balling the number of “got-aways,” defined as people seen crossing the border without being detained by U.S. officials.

Back home from his tango in Argentina, Obama said on his weekly radio address that the massacres would not change “our openness to refugees” (he still plans to import another 100,000 Muslim refugees) and he vowed to “reject any attempt to stigmatize Muslim-Americans, and their enormous contributions to our way of life” because we are “a nation built around the idea of religious freedom.”

Earlier that same week, Obama’s lawyer asked the Supreme Court to punish the Little Sisters of the Poor for exercising its religious freedom not to cover abortion and contraception in its employee health plan. Obama is eager to accommodate the religious freedom of Muslims who want to move to our country from the Middle East, so why won’t he recognize the “enormous contribution to our way of life” by Catholic nuns who operate thousands of America’s schools, hospitals and homes for the aged?